 Welcome back to Politics in Hawaii with Dennis Esapi on Think Tech Hawaii. Today we'll be speaking with James Konani Tokioka, a state representative from Hawaii. He has made a positive impact in the community and the hospitality industry and they're in the political world. He has been on the Kauai County Council for 10 years and in 2006 he got elected to the state legislature where he is now. Welcome Jimmy. Thank you for joining us today. Can you tell us a little bit? Aloha. Can you tell us why you first ran for office, especially as a former Republican and some of your proudest accomplishments while in political office? Yeah, thank you. Thank you for that question Jimmy, but I first want to start by thanking you for having me on the show Dennis. I've always admired you and respected you because talk about doing so much for the community. Our work is minuscule compared to the things that you are responsible for in building and constructing and without people like you and the engineering company, a lot of responsible stuff on this island would not happen. So I'm sure everybody who watches this show knows about you in some form, but I just wanted to go on the record and tell you thank you because every time I I need a spell checker. For every time I need to have a question about engineering or many, many things. Dennis, you're the first person in my mind that I call and for people who are wondering why Dennis is laughing, I send out brochures every year from my office at the state capitol and one year Dennis found the typo and he sent it to me and he said, Jimmy, by the way, there's a typo in your brochure. Me, I'm a terrible spell doctor. I thank God for a spell check and I thank God for other smart people who know how to spell. When I read it, I know it's spelled wrong, but sometimes you all miss stuff, but Dennis peruses. He always calls me and says, it's okay to pronounce it like that or write it like that, but it shouldn't be like this. So for somebody who you say didn't graduate, how did you graduate Dennis from my school? In English, second language. Yeah, that's what they sent me to. So I think it's interesting for people, it's good for people to know how meticulously this guy reads. And so that also goes down into your work as an engineer and thank you Dennis for all that help. So yes, what you said about my elections and the career that I took on, the 10 years in the county council started in 96 and then it went from 10 years from there to the state house now it's 15 years. The question that you asked about Republican, I wouldn't say, I wasn't, I ran as a Republican in 1996 for the county council. I was a nobody in office and I'm a very competitive person. And when people tell me that, you know, you cannot win, I take that as a challenge. And that's what happened because Mary Ann Krusaka who was the mayor at the time, she was the one who asked me to run for office. And, you know, I was, I had a restaurant at the time and, you know, I didn't know much about running for office. I didn't know much about campaigns, but what I knew at the time from running hotels and restaurants is that you need a good team around me. You need smart people. You need people who can help you meet people on this island. So I put a team together. Dan Mackey was my campaign manager when I started and until this day, he still is my campaign manager and a very, very good friend. A very, very good businessman. So I learned a lot from him. So that's what got me into office. And I say that because getting elected right after Ipimiki, I thought I had a good skill set to help reopen the island because my background was hotels and restaurants. So I spent a lot of time on the mainland at 11 years before I came back to open Marisha here. Ipimiki put a damper on that. I had to delay it for almost two years. But the reason I ran for office was I thought I could make a difference after Ipimiki marketing the island. You know, making sure that we put things in place so that the visitors can come back and have the same experience if not a better one after Ipimiki. So that was the impetus for me to run for office. And, you know, running as a Republican, as you know and everybody, a lot of people know on this island, it was me and Brian Baptiste that started at the time. And we were both approached by Mary and Fisaka and bless his heart, Mary Baptiste. I learned a lot from him about campaigning because that guy was nonstop, you know? We did a lot of things together when we were on the county council. And I, you know, as I was going through the show and I was on Felicia Cowden's show three weeks ago and Mel and Charlie's show a while ago, I was just looking at some of the things we did when we were on the county council. And there was a lot of things that we got done but we had a good team. You know, Ron Kochi was the county council chair. Darryl Connoisseur was the planning chair. I was there. Brian Baptiste was there. Randall Judge Valenciano was there. In the beginning, Billy Swain was there. So we had a really good team. And I learned a lot. But one of the things that, you know, I feel, you know, we accomplished was housing. And, you know, part of it was after Niki, there was federal money for housing. So, you know, the Ligui theater was, I was at the tail end of that, you know, making the appropriations for that. But, you know, whether it's Ele Nani from A and B and, you know, the Kukui Ula project, I think the Kukui Ula project to me is one of the projects that we got a lot of, not a lot, but we had some, a lot of people that weren't supportive of the project. But when I explained to them the conditions that came with the project, some of them understood, you know, like the roundabout in Pueblo, right, Dennis? Probably the best roundabout on this island. And that was put in by A and B and that was put in as a condition to the project, the wastewater treatment plan. You know, nobody likes to talk about wastewater treatment as you know better than anybody else, Dennis. But, you know, if somebody who's gonna come in and develop an area doesn't pay for it, then guess who's gonna pay for it? The county. And if the county's paying for it, then guess who's paying for it? Your property taxes. And that's, you know, that's why all of these entire conditions that we put in, a lot of it was housing. Puea, I think it's 134 units. On our village, one and two was 50 each. So that's a hundred units there. When they get up to 300 units, then they have to build additional housing at Kukuiula or, you know, write a check to the county. So those were, you know, a lot of good conditions, LA LA Nani, 152 units. And just off the top of my head, trying to remember some of the projects. That's just started from one development. And then the park, the park that we approved as well is gonna be maintained in perpetuity by the developer. Where does that happen? So, you know, I'm proud of a lot of the things. And like I said, it was a whole team effort. It was not 1%, but a lot of people working together. Lima Ola was a condition of, a part of the condition of Kukuiula. You know, it's just the sidewalks. If you walk around that area, the sidewalks are, you know, put in, and those things are all not cheap. And some of the conditions in me and DMB had to put in way before the project got developed. So I'm proud of those things that we accomplished. I'm, one of the things at the county council level is the, with your show Dennis, the net expo. So when I first started, you know, the internet had just been going off in 1996 and in Silicon Valley. So we put a team together and bought a lot of people here from the Silicon Valley to teach our Kukuiula and our children, you know, what was happening on the internet. And you can think about 1998. A lot of people didn't know what the internet was and it was slow and it was dial up and it just has progressed so far. But I still have contacts with the people that came for that expo. And I'm very, very proud of that. I think another one of the biggest accomplishments that I'm proudest of in my political career is the smoking ban and restaurants and bars. So that council chair, Kochi at the time, myself, Brian, that piece, we worked on that and it was tough because there were a lot of people, there were a lot of people that were against the smoking ban. I can remember, and I can share his name because, you know, he talked to me after it. Rob said, Rob, it's a good times girl. He was upset. He said, Jimmy, that's gonna kill my business if you ban smoking. And I said, Rob, I have a restaurant too. And I think about the employees that are in that restaurant. And I don't want them to suffer secondhand smoke and Janice Vaughn and her team worked very, very hard on that. And so today, shortly after that, maybe like a month or two after we passed that bill, Rob came into my office at the county council office and he said, Jimmy, I gotta apologize. You were right. I said, Rob, I wasn't trying to be right. I just trying to do what I think is right for the community. And he was so happy. So now you walk in Rob's and you don't walk out of there smelling like a cigar or I mean, a cigarette. So that's probably one of the things at the county council level that I'm proudest of. The bike path. You know, I just think of all of these things that happened from the time that I was there. We initiated, you know, mayor, mayors, Yukimura and Cusato and Baptiste who were all part of the introduction of it. But when we were there at the county council, that's when it started happening. And, you know, it's a beautiful thing in my opinion. It runs all the way from Manapola. And I cannot wait till it connects to Kauai Lagoon and Pocuala and that area. It's something that it's gonna be, and it is used now by a lot of local people. You see a lot of local people riding their bikes, walking their kids, all of the different comfort stations that are along the way for people who eat their picnic lunches, bentos, and, you know, very, very happy that they can sit in the shade and watch all of that. So, you know, that's the time that I had at the county council. But when I, the question that you asked when I joined, I didn't know anything about the Republican Party. When I went to some of the meetings, I was like, oh, I don't represent a lot of what they stood for. But I did have people that I respected, but I knew that my heart and the things that I stood for as far as, you know, helping people who need help, helping people that cannot help them, that have disabilities, you know, for people who don't know my son's deaf. And he was born shortly after I got elected. And then we found out that he was deaf. And so, you know, that just changed, you know, anytime you have kids then it's with disabilities or without, it changes your life. And then I could see how, you know, people who were blind and deaf and people who had, you know, any type of disabilities were not always at the front burner of issues when it came to legislation and politics. And I thought that I could make a difference. So here on Kauai, when I was at the County Council, there was an ADA lawsuit regarding the captioning of the County Council meeting. And so Ron Cochia, I give Ron Cochia credit for this because he knew Pono was deaf, but he said, we have two choices. It is something that should be for everybody captioning. Oh, then if it's not for everybody, then it shouldn't be for anybody. And that was a profound thing that he said at the time because I was like, so you're saying that you're going to take off the meetings from TV if it's not fair because the captionings are not on. And he said, yeah. So captioning is not cheap. I think the first contract that the County put out, I think it was in the neighborhood of 300,000 at the time. They didn't have as many word to voice technology, or voice to text technology, sorry. So, you know, Ron was instrumental. Speaking of Ron, he's just texted me. I don't think he's watching the show, but he just texted me, sorry. And, you know, Cochia was the first one. So when I went to the state capitol, I told speakers, I said, you know, it's not fair for deaf people, or even people who are hard of hearing to not have a meeting captioned. So we got that the year after I got there, we got funding to caption the meetings at the state capitol. So, you know, certainly certainly proud about that, but over the years it's just continuing to make sure that the voices of the people on the neighbor islands are heard. And I think we have a good team on Kauai. I know we have a good team on Kauai, and we're very fortunate around Cochia as the Senate president. So it's very helpful to our community that, you know, when Ron is given an issue that it's certainly gonna have a lot of credibility and weight behind it. So I think, you know, I feel very confident that we make a great team, and I'm proud of the ability to work with a team that is tenured and knows the different nuances of the government. Because, yeah, you can go sideways in a minute. Yeah, thanks. I'm sure you're a family neighbor. Dr. Bald, the district health officer was happy with your smoking ban. Yes, he was. Yeah, you know, as we're talking about the legislature, this past session, he passed some bills, the governor E.G. vetoed some of the bills, and the legislature overrode them. Can you tell us about some of them? Sure, I think technically a lot, he vetoed 28 bills, and of the 28 bills, more than half of them were technicalities because of the Americans Recovery Act funding from the federal government. One of the biggest ones in House Bill 200, which House Bill 200 is the budget bill. So everything in that bill is everything in the government, in the state of Hawaii. But the governor found out after the session closed that some of that money could not be used for paying off bond debt. And so if we didn't correct that, we couldn't pay off our debt. So, you know, the bill had to be vetoed and fixed. So it was a little bit of a complicated section, a special session, because we had to veto and fix. It's never happened before. And it's never happened before that a governor has vetoed 28 bills. One of the biggest controversial ones was House Bill 862, and that was the funding for HDA. So a lot of the organizations involved in the visitor industry, a lot of the nonprofit organizations that had funding through grants from HDA for colloquial plantation days. And they got on the emails and texted us and called us and emailed us to let us know that it was important to them that the funding be kept. Excuse me, but their legislators at the capitol that had some concerns with how HDA was funding projects, the procurement of the funding of the project. I was not one of them. I felt like HDA was doing a lot of good things in the pillars that they were addressing. I think that John DeFries, when he started, he came up with a plan and he was trying to execute that plan. It's hard to execute a plan when you're going through, you know, the biggest downturn in tourism in the state's history. But that was one of the biggest bills that was up in the veto override. And the rest were pretty much technical stuff. So, you know, we went in last week, Tuesday and we finished on Thursday and we think that all the bills are fixed now. And, you know, I'm hoping they are because every year on each side of the legislature, House and Senate, about 2,000 bills get introduced on each side. And at the end of the day, only about 300 or 400 bills passed. So it's just, you know, some of the good and the bad and making sure that it's all properly, the oversight is proper on each of the bills. So that's probably the biggest thing with the special session in my opinion. Yeah, thanks. Speaking about the HDA. Now, a lot of people are saying we've got too many tourists with too many effects of tourism. So what can the legislature do? Okay, so during COVID, you know, let's just go back to June of last, during that time, everybody was like, oh, we got to do something to open up the economy to get people to wear their masks to do this so that we can get visitors because we can't, there's no jobs. There's no people. A lot of the restaurants were closing on Hawaii. Everything was closing for a while. So I would say that, you know, tourism is not like a water faucet. You know, you cannot turn it on and turn it off, but what was amazing is when the mayor and the governor took away some of the conditions as far as quarantining and all of that, the numbers came in unbelievably strong. I just think that that's a few things, Dennis, is bent up, frustration for people not traveling is people not being able to go to other countries, Japan, South Korea, Australia. Some people don't feel safe going to Mexico right now. So they look at the numbers in Hawaii and they're coming here. As far as what can be done about the number of people, you know, it's hard to address that because you have airlines, right? That are gonna be selling cheap tickets and that's what they're doing right now. So the governor or the government cannot tell the airlines what to charge or how many flights to bring in. I mean, they can, as far as the fees, the airport fees, they can address it that way. But like I said, it's not like a faucet, you can turn it on and turn it off. But, you know, I'm like any other local person, I want the tourists to come, but I want them to come responsibly. But then you see tourists today on the news playing with the monk seals, which there's signs all over the place. They're gonna get, I'm hoping that they're gonna get prosecuted to the full effect of the law. I mean, you know, you don't wanna see that kind of stuff when tourists come over here, irresponsible tourists. But then there's a lot of other tourists that come and, you know, are very, very responsible. They could do cleanups and stuff like that. Part of the big problem right now, and everybody knows this on Hawaii, is that tourists, we don't have the inventory for rental cars. You know, we have the hotels are back, the hotels are back, but not all the hotels have all their employees back. And, you know, Paul Toner, who is a close friend of mine, we talk a lot about, you know, inventory and what's happening coming up in the months to come. But the hotel rooms are there and they're going up to the rates that they used to charge before COVID, but they don't have the employees. And then the rental cars, I talked to the rental car agencies at the peak of, before COVID, then as we had over 20,000 rental cars on the side, 20,000. After COVID, 10,000 of those cars were left Hawaii. Before they left, there were ornaments on golf courses at Kmart parking lot, at, you know, Kukui, I mean, Grove Farm in their, some of their fields and the grass was growing all over these rental cars, but they're all gone now. And a lot of the company said they can't get cars. And I think you've seen it on television and the shows that you watch about the microchips. You know, there's a big, big shortage of microchips. So the cars, they cannot produce the cars. The Japanese car makers stuffed up on chips, but the Americans not so much. There is that problem. There is, in the beginning of COVID, there was some uncertainty with some of the companies. Hertz went bankrupt, but then Hertz also purchased locally a lot of cars that they couldn't, because they were in bankruptcy, they couldn't purchase from the manufacturers themselves. So is that good for the economy? You know, I'm not sure because in local people, you go to King Auto right now, you go to Fuhil Motors, they don't have inventory. So you're trying to find a car right now, good luck on Kauai. You're certainly not gonna be able to get the car that you want. So how do you fix that? That is, you know, you're a guy who likes to figure out things that you can figure out and ask because, you know, if we continue on the path now, when the other countries open, we're not gonna have the same occupancy, but you still have to market. And a lot of people are saying, well, we should be marketing to the high end tourists. I don't know about that. What about the smaller hotels? But the smaller hotels bring in the discount tourists and some of the tourists come and they can't. And so you wanna stop all of that. You wanna stop some of that. Tell me how you stop it. That's all of it. That's what I would say about that. And I know, you know, people say, oh, we gotta move away from tourism. You cannot be an economy just based on one thing like tourism, okay, well, then what's the next thing? Because farming, I don't know if farming is gonna be the answer because why? As you know, Dennis, coming from families that work in the farms, your brother, it's hard work. It's very hard work. You get one storm and your crop is gone. So what's gonna be the next industry? Technology, man, I don't know. Anyway. Yeah, yeah. That's why we have you in the legislature. Figure it all out. Yep, you made good points about tourism and housing. The next big topic we have is housing. Yes. We think about, you know, what the state of the county doing. I got my dogs, but... I think the housing department on Hawaii has done a great job. You know, I'm blanking on the name now, but it's the shelter for women in need by the theater. You know, Kanani and Adam, you know, Kanani did that building in the front between the theater and that water department. I didn't think that we could put that, I think it's 62 units over there. I don't think, I didn't think we could do that there. And it's gonna be opening pretty soon. And the women in need shelter, that was in the whole, entire time that I've been in office, that was the fastest project that the government ever did. And it's awesome. But what I will say specifically about housing is a lot of people say, oh, you know, there's too many people coming from the mainland and they buying houses on Kauai. Okay, let's analyze that. Who's selling them the houses on Kauai? It's Kauai people. And, you know, there's some people that move. There's some people that have land from parents and they sell the land. And guess what? They're not gonna sell it for, you know, the Kama'aina friends and family, right? They're gonna go to the highest rate. And sometimes it's not gonna be somebody, a local person that's born and raised on Kauai that can afford it. But to the guy selling it, he's trying to make as much as he can because he wants to buy land someplace else on the mainland, maybe, maybe another lot here or something else. But that's the biggest problem. And then unless you can tell me other, I mean, there's other things that are issues, but that's one of the things. And I would say like some of the vacation rental housing. So those, the people that have bought those houses in, you know, the VDA or other places, they want to make money. So they vacation rental it. And that's another problem that we have with housing. So, you know, and what is the biggest choke point? You know that? Yeah. Yeah. That's upon, you know, the housing department doing a great job and expediting. Yes, they are on the very low end. You know, they do fast track. They, you know, they exempt from a lot of the conditions. But along that lines, the housing for the regular working class, they, you know, and they get so many conditions they get satisfied and there's no fast track. So time takes, you know, many months, maybe years to do, you know, housing projects and time is money. And it gets some other conditions, I think, you know, that you got to be looked at to expedite that. I agree, Dennis, but every time stuff comes up, there's a lot of political will to stop it. But, you know, affordable housing. Let's talk about affordable housing. But before you get to that affordable house, you got to put in the drainage. You got to put in underground utilities. Now you got to put in a solar water heater. And, you know, all of these things are good things, but it's going to make the price higher. So, you know, as legislators, as we're going through the process of putting in these conditions to make the community better, it's also jacking up the price. You know, and we tried to do 201H to expedite stuff, but, you know, there always seems to be chokeholds at different points. And, you know, I'm sure there are better ways for us to do it, but it's difficult. Yeah, Jimmy, it's great to talk to you that our time is about to run out. We got so much more to talk about maybe later, but any losing words? No, you know, Dennis, just thank you for reaching out to me to do this show. I mean, I appreciate it. I always enjoy talking to you and for listeners who don't know you very well, Dennis, you know, is not doing a lot of the talking on this show, but Dennis is a very smart, funny guy. And I always, when we're talking, I'm always laughing at some of the things and your profound knowledge that you have. So thank you for everything, Dennis. Yeah, thanks. Thank you to Jimmy Tokioka for joining us today. Mahalo also to the viewing audience. If you enjoyed this show and others, please support Think That Hawaii. I'm Dennis Isaki with Politics in Hawaii. Until next time, Mahalo and Aloha.